Hello! I love your blog and work a lot, thank you for it! I have a request that you obviously don't have to fill if you don't want to, but I've seen you uploading many pictures taken by fansites who have already received their 3rd and last warning from Starship due to invading the members privacy too many times. As a Monbebe who don't want to support fansites who knowingly take risks of breaking rules, I'd want to ask if you could consider stop sharing their pictures. Again, it's just a request
Hi! First of all, thank you for appreciating all of our work!
There isn’t an easy way to approach this matter, so I’m gonna do it strictly personally, as the creator of this blog.
I could obviously be wrong, but I do recall some of these fansites getting their 3rd warning back in 2017: All of Me, IMYOURS, IM HERE, Crush On, Everblooming, Heartwaves, Be My Peterpan, and so on. As a result (and if Starship really sticked to their warnings — I sincerely cannot recall if that happened), the fansites were banned for an indefinite period of time from attending MONSTA X activities (and until this day I don’t believe they post as much as they did back then anymore).
Ever since, I don’t recall any more lists being released from Starship’s side. There was a time back in Beautiful/Shine Forever eras where fansites would just blatantly post previews of unknown/private schedules in cryptic tweets, censoring dates and all, almost as if they were mocking everyone, so Starship wouldn’t see them — and I do believe 2017 was the most critical year in this matter and maybe your request would have made sense back then.
Now where am I trying to get: as I don’t hold any solid proof to call any fansite a stalker or a ‘sasaeng’ (and apparently nor does Starship, as they all attended ‘Alligator’ promos), and as this blog only posts previews of known schedules, I don’t believe there’s a reason to exclude any fansite (as of now — it could change in the future, as we do keep an eye on what goes on with the Korean fansites). If I begin excluding fansites then I would also feel obliged to exclude airport previews, as we all know how chaotic and stressful those moments can be for the members, as well as an invasion to their privacy. But all of this is relative and it also happens with MONSTA X in other parts of the world, so as an updates blog, and from an activity point of view, would that be entirely wise?
Please do know I understand where you’re coming from and that fansite culture is by far the thing that weirds me out the most in K-pop, but we are not supporting the fansites in any way by reposting their pictures (we do not promote their unofficial merch sales at all, which is how they actually make money) and we do not condone album sales via fansites either. The entire concept of a being fansite is weird enough as it is, but for this blog’s sake — and since I haven’t seen any fansite directly harming MONSTA X for a while now — I don’t think we could fairly exclude any fansite.